Lesson 3 in the Simple Tiger SEO Training Course
This is where the dirty ground work begins in search engine optimization. Before I get too far into this I want to direct you to a source you absolutely need if you want to get into SEO. In order to truly tap the power of a successful SEO campaign, you really need to learn CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. I won’t teach you that here, but it is necessary. If you want to go directly to the source, visit the W3 Schools.
The on page factors are numerous for achieving good rankings, but the most important ones are:
Page Titles - The title at the top of the page is what is shown as the title of a site in search engine results. The title sums up what the entire page is about, so make it very keyword prominent to what you will discuss in the page. Try to get your keywords to the front of the title like:
Internet Business Marketing | Simple Tiger
My goal here is to rank for “Internet Business Marketing” not “Simple Tiger” so I wouldn’t have my title like this:
Simple Tiger | Internet Business Marketing
Meta Keywords - Some say this tag is not in use any more, but regardless, it takes five seconds to fill this tag with your target keywords for the page and it can only help. Do not repeat the same keyword more than 2-3 times, and only include words that are in the content of the page. The keywords are comma separated and should look like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”internet business marketing, small business seo” />
Description - The description is what appears beneath the title in the search engine results. The description is actually more useful than the keywords meta tags, so keep this in mind when writing a good description. The description tag should only contain between 25-30 words and look like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Learn SEO fast with the Simple Tiger SEO Training Course” />
H1-H6 - Header tags tell the search engine what is most important on the page. When using header tags, words that are in the <h1> tags are more important than words that are in the <h6> tags. <h1> tags also tend to enlarge the text as they are primarily used for a header on a page like a news headline. You can change the size of header tags using CSS like you learned from the W3 Schools. 
Alt Tags - Alt tags tell a search engine about an object like an image or an animation. Alt tags are important not only for SEO but also because they help people who have disabilities like blindness read your site. An alt tag should use dashes “-” to separate the keywords so they are parsed correctly by the search engines. Proper alt tag syntax would look like this:
<img src=”images/jeremiah-smith.jpg” alt=”seo-professional-jeremiah-smith”>
Sitemaps - Sitemaps are very important because they not only allow a user to find what they are looking for on your site, but they also allow search engines to inventory anything they find on your sitemap. A sitemap is a collection of links to all of the pages in your site. It is a general rule of thumb to not have more than 30 links in your sitemap because some search engines including Google consider pages with more than 30 links to be link farms. There are two basic types of sitemaps:
- HTML Sitemaps - These are very user friendly and almost every site should have them. They are much more irritating to update every time you make a change on your website, and search engines don’t favor them as much as the second type.
- XML Sitemaps - These sitemaps work extremely well for search engines, but they look like crap to humans. You can create a sitemap very quickly by using a sitemap generator like this one.
It is usually best to have both types of sitemaps on your website, an HTML version for users, and an XML version to submit to search engines. We will discuss submitting sitemaps to search engines in the next lesson, so be patient young grasshopper!
Footer Links - These text links at the bottom of your site help search engine rankings tremendously because a spider reads your site top to bottom, and when the spider gets to the bottom of a page, the footer links tell it where to go next. If you have footer links on every page of your site, spiders are more likely to index more pages of your site. Footer links usually look like this:
Learn SEO Fast | Contact Us | About | Ebook | Advertise
Keyword Prominence - One old saying in the world of search is “Content is king”. If content is king then it must contain words that are relevant to your business or purpose. When keywords appear several times in a body of text and throughout an entire page it is known as “keyword prominence”. There is a very fine line between keyword stuffing which is a black hat technique, and having the perfect amount of keywords on your page in order to rank for them. The best way to ensure that you are not keyword stuffing, yet still using your keywords effectively is to read it aloud to your self.
Incorrect: “Search Engine Optimization is the main service offered by Search Engine Optimization company Simple Tiger.”
Correct: “Search Engine Optimization is the main service offered by Simple Tiger.”
All of the factors mentioned above are the most important on the page factors in a successful search engine optimization campaign. Using them in conjunction with each other and on every page of your site may not put you on the first page of search engine results, but they will definitely place you ahead of anyone who isn’t using these methods. All of the methods mentioned above are entirely white hat SEO techniques.
If you wish to incorporate your SEO knowledge into a blog, please keep reading as I will be releasing a training course on how to optimize a blog for search engine results.
The next lesson “Site Structure - Become A File Architect and Search Engines Will Love You” explains how to optimize the file structure and layout of your website for better search engine rankings.
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December 7th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
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December 7th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
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December 8th, 2007 at 7:11 am
hey, Jeremiah, how are you?
I thought this was a great summary. The only thing I could spot missing was was ‘link text’, but I guess that’s going to be in another chapter.
On HTML sitemaps: I usually tend to think “if you need a human-readable sitemap, you probably need to take another look at your navigation’. Do you have a source for the Google ‘30 links = linkfarm’ thing? I’ve heard similar in the past, but thought this was now a myth.
What do you think about links out to other sites? Do you think 20 links to tennis tips webpages will flag your page as a ‘tennis’ page?
Thanks again - enjoying your blog.
daniel
December 8th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Daniel, I will definitely be discussing text links like anchor text in an upcoming blog post.
The main reason you need a human readable sitemap is if you have a site with several pages. It is hard to work 40+ pages into a navigation depending on the type of system you use. I recommend it any way, they never look bad to search engines really as long as all of the links on the sitemap page are internal. Some search engines consider an internal link that looks like this “http://www.example.com” to be an external link. They would actually prefer to see internal links look like this “/contact/index.html.
I think 20 outbound links would force search engines to assume you are relevant to tennis, but if you want to rank for tennis you need to reflect that in navigation, file names, headers, titles, meta tags, inbound links, and most importantly content. Otherwise search engines assume you simply recommend these tennis sites and for some reason care less about what you rank for.
I really appreciate your interest in my blog and I hope you stick around. Soon after the Simple Tiger SEO Training Course I will be teaching how to integrate this info into a blog and use the blow to make money online. Please keep commenting and let me know if you have any suggestions.
Thanks!